


More Accursed Items

by fivefootnothing



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-06
Updated: 2009-03-06
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:40:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivefootnothing/pseuds/fivefootnothing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor has collected many things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Accursed Items

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the J. Robert Lennon prose piece "The Accursed Items," featured on an episode of This American Life.

The fist-sized chunk of misshapen glass, the only tangible remnant of the once-inhabited asteroid where, at the trailing edge of a drink-induced stupor, you slept fully-clothed on warm, black, volcanic sands and dreamt of Gallifrey for the first time in well over a century.

A spatula, rendered bent and useless by over-enthusiastic hotcake flipping.

The warrior's helmet, repurposed as a flagon, filled to overbrimming with liquid, which you cannot remember the origins of, but its foamy bubbles scurry along gilt edges, life-like, seeking out a warm throat to cascade down like an amber waterfall.

A blanket, once accompanied by a matching scarf, abandoned when you discovered its strange, ectothermic properties, absorbing warmth from all living creatures and converting it into energy, but always at the cost of the utilizer's life.

A black mask made of feathers, obtained at a fancy dress party on Earth, kept by a friend and companion long gone, now kept by you as a constant reminder of what you had lost when she left that warm kiss on your cheek.

Emergency rations found in the tattered knapsack of a corpse, burnt to ash-black by a Dalek ray, which caught your eye because of the way the crumpled package resembled the packets of food you toted about from lesson to lesson at the Academy, morsels of nourishment you endeavored not to eat, for fear of losing your concentration to such base desires as hunger.

The stuffed bear with sandy-blond fur, sea-blue button eyes, and panama hat, tucked away in a long-forgotten room, seated and remembering, always remembering hushed and endless nights spent in the dark, listening to the rhythmic exhalations of your lungs and, curiously listening to the constant twin-beat emanating from your chest, imagining how terrible it must be for Time Lords to require their emotions be split between two hearts.

A single gray feather, plucked out of the air by bone-thin, blood-stained fingers as you slipped, ghost-like, through city streets a trillion light years from Earth, which, when eyes were finally laid upon your treasure, turned out not to be from the bird species which harbored healing properties, promised by the cackling shaman a few hours before, as you crouched in the shadows of his cooking fire, gulping down half-cooked slices of meat from an animal which once had been a rabbit, or a hare, or a large rodent.

The scroll containing the inked paw prints of the last cat in existence, who will also be the first cat in existence within the universe trailing at the back of the present one.

One sonic screwdriver. Somewhere.

A daisy chain woven by palsied fingers and placed atop your fair hair like a crown, bestowing all judicial power governing the galaxies upon you and your own, which you hesitantly accepted, lest you witnessed the continued slaughter of millions of children, all under the age of seven, for sport.

A wagon wheel, spokes broken in uneven places by a creature's massive jaws, its wood finish discolored from poisonous saliva, a single, solitary tooth embedded in its inner bend.

A sun jar, which you once endeavored to carry within your voluminous pockets, but which managed to scorch holes into every coat you slid across your shoulders.

The painting which shows you all that others see, shows you as others see you, the shadows of your past and your future drift along your countenance as you stare, dreamlike, into the dynamic strokes of paint splashed across the canvas, and if you get your gaze right, just right, your countenance disappears and you simply see brush strokes, the existence of which leads you to the realization that any physical object in the universe could, if gazed at the correct angle, be reduced to its most basic components, its brushstrokes, and this brings you to vast understanding about reality, but solving this mystery leads you to despair, for you didn't wish to know of the puppeteer manipulating the puppets.

The pair of wire-framed spectacles you carry around in your inner coat pocket, the glass trapped between the wire bending light in ways unimaginable to human physicists and which allow you to see to great depth and great minutiae and sometimes, merely sometimes, allow you a glimpse of the reality which exists beyond and above this one.

The record album, obtained at great sacrifice to yourself, which, when played at a speed non-congruent to the normal revolutions per minute of Earth's vinyl sound storage, will emulate the exact sound of the TARDIS dematerializing, and which you rarely listen to, for fear of causing a pique of jealousy in the living mind of your time-ship.

The shoe, slipped off the foot of a young woman, whom you abandoned on Earth, thinking it best that she not follow you on your foolhardy adventures for a time, whom you promised to return to but never did, that promise weighing densely on your mind until you made it imperative that none within your charge would ever be abandoned again.


End file.
